Microsoft Word

£59.99/year (Microsoft 365) or £112.99 (one-off purchase) FROM office.com

3 Word closely mirrors Pages, but it’s not a simple rip-off. For one thing, Word’s tools are much better organised. In Pages you get a top row of buttons and a collapsible sidebar, with menu bar items for the rest. Word uses tabs, which conceal a multitude of tools yet never overwhelms.

Word has robust reviewing tools and extensive data visualisation options (although these are fiddlier to edit than in Pages). And its templates are not as extensive or well-made as those in Pages. It’s expensive, but that’s because you get a

suite of apps (such as Excel) beyond just Word (you can buy the apps outright, but won’t get feature updates).

It’s not for distractionfree writing or for Markup use. And we miss the absence of any kind of central library to manage related files, and it has few of Scrivener’s smarter creative touches. Yet if you’re a prose writer, it most definitely excels.